


poured the body open

by rhymae



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Blood and Violence, God Complex, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Heiwajima Shizuo/Orihara Izaya, Moral Ambiguity, POV Second Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-デュラララ!!×２ 結 | Durarara!!x2 Ketsu, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 15:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20744339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhymae/pseuds/rhymae
Summary: You never had to be good.Not for this, not for the monsters you know, lurking in the shadows. Shinra’s face outshining them all like a kerosene fire.Shinra says, the apparition of him you can’t seem to run from, smiling that kind, empty smile: “No one can save you from what you made yourself.”And you think how you could cut your tongue on every lie you twisted this city with and still come back not nearly as bloodied.Or: Izaya, Shinra, Shizuo, and the circles they make.





	poured the body open

**Author's Note:**

> “I told myself:
> 
> I have been lost before, I have been cold before.  
The night has come to me  
exactly this way, as a premonition—  
  
And I thought: if I am asked  
to return here, I would like to come back  
as a human being, and my horse
> 
> to remain himself. Otherwise  
I would not know how to begin again.”
> 
> — Louise Glück, Averno

**  
**   
  
  
  
  
**I.**

You could talk your way around Ikebukuro in the dark.

It’s so easy, ending up right back where you started without a bruise.

Simple as it’s always been- the city growing on the fingertips of a middle school kid, a high schooler holding his own in the yakuza.

There’s a power in it. To it, really. How the rules never change, just shift to how you adapt them.

In one way, you can think of it like this: how anything you touch, you can mold. 

Or, maybe, how anything that touches you doesn’t get to come away unscathed. 

Everything you touch gets a mark; everything that marks you doesn’t escape your presence. 

Shinra had said, over a decade ago, that what you are doesn’t collect into a good person. It wasn’t meant to be funny, but it’s still your favorite joke. The punchline is in how Shinra never flinched when you laughed. 

And it’s fine, because you’re even for it.

Shinra never saw you for anything but what you were, and you never did stop seeing all that blood painting over him. 

**II.**

Shinra’s in the shadows, the days you go looking for him.

After your failed final trial, when your legs refuse to connect you to them correctly. 

He isn’t any more of a monster than Shizuo was when he tore apart that lamp post, but he’s there now and grinning and you think-

Well, it never matters what you think when it comes to this.

Shinra always had this nasty habit of knowing exactly how to read you. Down from what you planned to say right to what you didn't. 

You don’t know how it’s worked between you so long: you and the two monsters of Ikebukuro on your tail. 

You as the shadow crowding theirs.

It’s an anomaly, and you don’t think about it. It’s another kink in the chain, another line you grow used to having there.

It isn’t until the empire you built around you comes crumbling down, caught between your knife and Shizuo’s fists, that you wondered just how fundamental that piece was.

You have nightmares sometimes, about the things you didn’t do. That neither of them did.

Shinra taking you apart in that lab coat. Shizuo ripping your head too fast from your body.

Dream you says, “Do it, monster.” And it’s an echo for a promise you never thought you’d get to keep.

And here, Shizuo listens, for once in his life. Over and over and over. And Shinra doesn’t do a thing.

That you didn’t expect him to doesn’t make it any better. 

**III.**

There are always steps to making a god. 

You don’t remember taking the first ones. The distant pitter-patters that led you to Shinra bleeding out across the biology floor. 

You remember everything else excessively.

The knife, Nakura, the way you let your name take on the bloodied edge you’d eventually earn yourself anyway. 

Gambling rings had nothing on what they led up to, but you still count them towards the end shape. Tied them up nice and pretty in the shape of a high school kid with the yakuza at his fingers.

The picture you have of Shinra is this: laid out and open, scarring red like all the creatures he talks about taking apart. It was all painfully cold, the way the room smelled like iron and chemicals.

How there was a phone call you don’t remember making, but are informed later that yes, you did. That was your voice straining so quiet over the line that the responders had to track your location rather than take your word.

You’d thought, _ there’s so much blood. _ Something chilling up your spine you didn’t know how to name. 

And once the cops let you walk from the interrogation table, you layered it up into something untouchable. 

Shinra had said, two days later and in the hospital when you finally manage to sneak in through the window, with the gall to look shocked: “Oh, Orihara-kun. I didn’t expect you to come.”

Like he couldn’t feel the cold dripping through your system, the way the city seemed to become a littered hell until you had heard he finally stabilized. As if the city didn’t reconstruct itself around him like a second skin to you.

And then, smiling: “Didn’t you hear? Your name is all over the news.”

**IV.  
**

**  
**

The city tells you things. 

Told, if you’re being specific enough to name what you tried to burn down with brutal accuracy.

It tells everyone things, but you know how to listen. You know the right way to translate the code to open more pieces. Another code to shape them back out again.

A kind that doesn’t make monsters but skins them raw for the streets to judge.

There have always been layers to the game, and you had them nearly slit across your wrist. Right before you nearly lost the whole arm. It isn’t ironic if you don’t count the steps you lost in it. 

Blood’s a language you’re fluent in, but there are some messages you wish you could forget.

You don’t expect a visit, of course. You lost, and the game wasn’t made to be fair, but it still wakes you up screaming half the time, crawling towards the bathroom for the other.

You don’t expect a call, either, or for your name to ever be heard across Ikebukuro again. No matter how long you live on after.

You planned it that way, after all.

You didn’t expect to survive it. The steps you’re taking aren’t supposed to exist.

You’re supposed to haunt not hobble. To be the ghost of a name in every citizens’ throat and not the body thrown against it.

It’s cruel to think how you’d be considered lucky if you can be either.

After the third day in the hospital, your stitches rip. 

There’s no monster to finish you off. No underground doctor to stitch you up, and no eyes of the city watching, waiting for you to drown from them.

You laugh so hard the nurse staff have to pin your legs down. You don’t even notice until you see them do it. 

You think about telling Kine to order a higher dosage. If he would do it without you having to ask, and what that would mean as a result.

It takes another hour for your legs to stop shaking against the sheets.

**V.  
**

There’s a misconception tied to the position you’ve earned yourself in Ikebukuro.

You’ve never had trouble playing a god when you wanted it, but there’s something no one seems to get. Or, well, no one aside from one. It’s easy, if anyone thought to look close enough:

You never made anyone play a role they hadn’t already revealed themselves capable of.

So when Sonohara corners you, between the Blue Squares and Yellow Scarves and all the other little kid games bruised beyond recognition and stained red with her friend's names, and says: “If it takes a god to kill you, I’ll make one.”

It shouldn’t make you laugh as hard as it does.

When she bares her sword to your throat, your knife is already there to meet her.

**VI.**

On your worst days, you rehearse past meetings over and over.

Mostly because it’s fun. Mostly because you can.

Sometimes, even, because you like playing the prophet in your own prophecies.

There are parameters, places you don’t visit. That stem too close to high school and even earlier.

You remember meeting the Dollar’s leader and you smile, laugh when it was returned, a little too falsely forced, like the kid was playing as something other than thrilled to see you. 

It was beautiful, when you’re tired enough to appreciate a beginning taking shape across your hands. The chatroom locked in your pocket, a head of golden hair at your fingertips.

You’d say, “It’s amazing the heights people can reach when properly motivated, isn’t it?”

And the kid looks back at you like he’s seeing through you, but you can place the sharpness there. 

A mirror into a mirror, like looking through and only seeing the back.

It makes the night colder than it was. Makes the city burn brighter in front of you.

“Yeah,” the kid says, and the words feel like fire when they come out like ice.

The bells around the city ringing with possibility, with past, with the leader of the Yellow Scarves ready to pounce on you, standing behind the kid’s back like you don’t have him tucked up your sleeve. Like you couldn’t play the city under and choke it two fold.

“It is.”

**VII. **

Shinra couldn’t make you good, that’s fine. 

No one can. Or, maybe, you could just never get close enough to someone who modeled the aspired form of good. 

You never asked for it. You never wanted that, anyway. Even if it seems so far out of your reach now.

In one way, you can look at it like this, trace it back to high school before it all festered permanently bloody: Shinra the puppet, and you as the one never pulling the strings he’s so happy to hand over.

Another, and Nakura didn’t make it out of the classroom without a knife in his back.

Blood for blood and all that sentimentality you don’t give name to, recalling how you watched Shinra giggle quietly and bleed across the floor.

Having Nakura at your mercy wasn’t worth it, but Shinra had put on his gold cape that day. Graced you with mercy as poison sat at the edge of your tongue.

The cape that makes him romanticize beings you would give an arm to ensure disappear forever.

The one he would still kill you while wearing, unflinching, if he knew what you thought about her.

It’s exciting, sometimes. When you can’t get out of your own head. When the city streets feel too small for all you’ve done across them.

Shinra had said, not too long after, monster smile in place and warm as ice in the way only you have been allowed to see him: “You’re going to do it one day. Die, I mean. You should stop running from inevitability.”

And isn’t there something bittersweet in that, you’d thought. A game building on a game, no winner anywhere in sight between you.

Being trusted by the untrustworthy, understood enough to claw at what hides in the dark. 

And then you look at your legs, torn into pieces of pieces like a mosaic you never wanted, and you laugh and laugh and _ laugh_. Even after the blood from your nails starts to pool over the bed.

It’s okay, maybe. 

It can be what you want it to be, here. In the dark without monster eyes watching.

**VIII.**

  
You fuck Shizuo Heiwajima and it doesn’t mean a thing more than you let it.

The monster doesn’t kill you in your sleep, doesn’t crush you or burn the place down while you’re inside. 

It could count as improvement, if you measured anything like this on a scale. 

But it’s more like calculated tolerance. Loneliness that ricochets and doesn’t look back when dressing itself in the mirror.

Shizuo looks at you, certain nights when you’ve sat together for too long, weighted by something heavy and sad, and of course he makes it unfair. It’s in his job description at this point: menace and monster. 

An attempted Jehovah, as if you were the one who ever tried to make him into anything like that.

But again, nothing has ever been fair between you, and maybe that’s half the fun. 

Half of what keeps you coming back, bleeding but never begging. A monster always following hot on your tale.

You’ve been told you have a penchant for those. 

Shizuo says, quiet, between the sex laced sheets and the cigarettes you can always smell for days after they’re gone: “I don’t get why you do this.”  
  
  
And you could echo it back, a million times over, really. The sentiment not meant for you and not nearly half as sweet.

The knife’s still under your pillow, but you don’t reach for it.

You say, “There’s a lot of things you don’t get about me, Shizu-chan.” And smirk, wide as your face will allow. 

The monster sneers, and you laugh a loud, ugly sound. The nights play on around you like a trick. 

When he leaves, there’s a broken bed post behind him, bruises you busy yourself with counting until the door closes.

There’s a routine for everything and his runs like this: Shizuo fights, you flee, and eventually you end up somewhere across town, private and locked away, the city burning a hole into your back. Both of you praying for someone else.

It’s a circle, and you play it over so often you wonder if maybe you’ve finally broken it in.

**VIIII.**

Penance is never a token you played with. 

Shinra never took the role you shaped out for him, and Shizuo carved his own. The gang wars tied themselves up in Raira’s next generation, and it doesn’t burn too bright when you aren’t looking for it.

You still get the credit. It’d be flattering if it paid itself off. 

Still, everything done in Ikebukuro is considered your doing. Fine. 

Shinra says, the apparition of him you can’t seem to run from, smiling that kind, empty smile: “No one can save you from what you made yourself.” 

And you think about what it would really take for you to die. For the twisted thing inside of you to cave. 

What it would mean if you had _ won. _

And you want to truly kill something for the first time in your life. 

You could cut your tongue on every lie you twisted this city with and come back twice as bloodied. 

But you aren’t that cruel. 

Or, maybe, you aren’t that kind. 

Not kind enough to share your face again, and never your name. 

You’ve never been the one to fear what you couldn’t see, but you know your limits, now. 

Maybe better than you ever have before, and you don’t think about how small it makes it all feel. 

**X.**

  
You don't meet with Celty unless you have to.

It's an easy standard, no matter how closely attached she is with Shinra and Shizuo.

It's mutual, and it's bleeding with irony, yes, but she doesn't like you anymore than you do her.

So it works like this: you have an errand, she makes the run. Shinra waits at her beckon and call and the city goes up in flames when you feel like it.

The events even out in your favor when you like them to.

This one's easy. It's a job to keep the yakuza off your trail for a little while, to keep yourself underground. You pulled her away from Shinra's recovery more times than she'd like, but that's half the fun.

You move to hand her the note you need delivered, say, "It's fairly simple, you know. I'm sure even a monster like yourself can handle this one." Your arm reaches out lazily.

And she flinches.

The world stops moving for just a moment, and you know, then, with cold certainty that she knows.

That all the blood staining across your name doesn't mean anything to her now, not with Shinra spilling your secrets through his own, staining across the sparkling floor of their shared apartment. 

You don't think to wonder when it happened. Whether middle school stories got exchanged over boredom or as a little anecdote, under the influence of pain medications or the promise of something else- as a joke, maybe. Why it's _now_, of all times.

You say, aiming for teasing and missing by a mile, "What, cat got your tongue, courier?" freezing all over.

Celty pulls out her phone, but her fingers stay stalled over the keyboard.

You wonder, for just a moment, what expression she would be wearing right now if you gave her head back.

You don't do it, of course. Petty revenge isn't worth the cost of your planning, not with something cold still lodged in your throat and making your words come out more lilted than you'd like.

Celty takes the note, makes the run.

Neither of you mention anything about how she didn't need to finish the message.

**XI.**

Like you said, you don’t have to be good.

You've never had to be good, not for this, not for all the monsters you know, lurking in the shadows. Shinra’s face outshining them all like a kerosene fire. 

You’ve never had to be that for him, the one person who knows you like the back of his hand. 

It’s still never clean, though. The cuts, that is, when you make them- across the city or on his couch. 

With him or through him or dancing along the edges of your high school with a monster trailing too close behind, it’s never clean and it could turn into a million things if you let it.

You’ve been a lot of things, you think. 

And you shut it off before you can count how many.

You’re good at what you do. There’s no question, no doubt in your quality. 

Shiki’s continued business assured it. Shizuo’s rage like a confirmation that burns your presences across the streets of Ikebukuro. 

You love humanity so much it’s suffocating, too many hands reaching out to pull the air from your lungs like it doesn’t belong there.

But it’s never been about that.

You always give it so much more gently than you thought you could.

The first time a human stabs you, there’s no other body to take the fall that time.

It’s so much easier than you thought it could be.

**XII.**

Kine says, “I hear the monster of Ikebukuro is still crawling.”

And maybe he’s trying to be kind, or maybe he’s playing cruel a little better than you expected from him, but either way you can feel the smile rising on your face.

Your chest feels torn somewhere between assured and sour, but you don’t name it. Three layers shadow over the unease running through your blood.

You think, _which one?_ And it's not as warm as you want it to be.

Instead, you say, “I’m beginning to think that city likes to breed immortals.”

  
  
And the joke lands between you both, your shattered legs and whatever it is monsters try to play as these days. You glance at the wheelchair parked against the wall.

Kine’s responding huff is the loudest sound in the room.

**XIII.**

Afterwards, there are still days you’re more careful than others.

Maybe it’s the psychological shock the doctors couldn’t wait to label you with, or maybe it’s just the effect of losing half yourself to city you don’t name.

Either way, the shadows grow greater those days. They build figures with bleach blonde hair like they’re streaming out straight from a biker’s helmet.

Others, it's glasses and the glint of a knife, peeking out the side.

You’ve never been the greatest in the grasps of fear. And you don’t dwell on concepts like regret.

When you see the shadows, you think how could lie through your teeth, say, “I don’t think about you anymore.”

  
  
And how maybe it would count if you try hard enough to mean it.

  
  
Shinra always said you were bad at playing self-aware, but Shinra was bad at playing human, so you count it as a draw.

Some ghosts, you’re learning, don’t leave. No matter how much you ask them to. 

**XIIII.**

Here's the thing, the missing piece caught between Shinra and Shizuo and even Celty, high school kids playing sane and gang leaders on the weekends, and the entire city clawing up your back:

  
  
There were two paths to the end until you carved yourself out a third.

**XV.**

You had said, the last week before you decided it all had to come crashing down at your hand, casual injuries working as the excuse leading you back to Shinra’s doorstep, eventually onto his balcony: “I didn’t know you had such an investment in this city.”

  
  
And what you said wasn’t what you meant, of course. 

You meant something like, _ twelve years and here we are still _ . And, _ your headless girlfriend is looking a little worse for wear. _

Or, even, _ did you ever picture it turning out like this? _

Shinra hummed, and the sound soaked through your skin, the city lights catching his glasses from where he was leaning on the railing.

The city looked like it was burning. It was the prettiest you’d ever seen it.

“You’re very peculiar in what you chose to see, Izaya-kun,” Shinra offered, an empty grin lining his lips.

He didn’t look at you, not even once.

He always had a way of knowing exactly what you wanted. And exactly how to keep from giving it to you.

Shinra said, quiet against the sounds of the city growing beneath you: “I really don’t.”

When you said goodbye that night, Shinra finally electing to look back at you, you kept your smile all teeth.

**Author's Note:**

> “I want to be haunted. I want autumn, flowers bathed in blood, the sort of intensity that weighs me down against my own will.”  

> 
> — Julia de Burgos, Autumn Psalm.
> 
>   
This took me too long, but thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> I own nothing besides the title. I hope you enjoyed & comments and kudos are so appreciated & make me incredibly happy. Find me on tumblr @rhymaes.
> 
> Alternatively- in which Izaya screams 'I want to be your greatest grief!' and makes the city into his own funeral pyre.


End file.
